Typically, in producing complex semiconductor products, such as integrated circuit devices, thousands of processing steps are required to obtain the resultant product. In order to enhance profitability, it is important that the yield or numbers of useful integrated circuit devices obtained from a single silicon wafer during processing be maximized. Accordingly, semiconductor manufacturers go to great lengths to provide the greatest yield during the manufacturing of the semiconductor devices. Such devices are typically manufactured under clean room conditions in order to substantially eliminate any airborne contaminates from reaching the surface of the silicon wafers during processing, and reducing the yield. Also, during the actual processing of the silicon wafers, certain other processing steps may themselves cause contaminates to be deposited upon the wafer surface, making it necessary after predetermined processing steps have been completed, to clean the surface of the wafer before proceeding with subsequent processing or manufacturing steps, in order to ensure the highest possibly yield on the devices being produced.
A typical cleaning cycle during the manufacture of semiconductor products involves wet wafer cleaning, which usually involves a plurality of cleaning steps. Initial steps typically involve either spraying a mixture of chemicals and water onto the surface of the wafer, or immersing the wafer into such a mixture, followed by water rinse steps and drying steps, before the silicon wafer proceeds to further device processing. A cleaning sequence commonly known in the art as "RCA-clean" is often used in semiconductor manufacturing. One of the steps used in the "RCA-clean" is commonly known as the "SC 1" step, for removing particles from the surface of the silicon wafers being processed. However, the "SC 1" step tends to increase the metal contamination on the surface of the wafer, requiring that a subsequent cleaning step commonly known as "SC 2" be included to reduce the metal contamination from the prior "SC 1" step. Unfortunately, even with this additional "SC 2" step, it has been determined that the remaining metal concentration on the surface of the semiconductor silicon wafer is often not reduced to a low enough level, whereby the remaining metal concentration tends to reduce the yield of devices such as 64M DRAMs and 256M DRAMs, for example. Accordingly, semiconductor manufacturers are conducting ongoing research programs to find ways to further reduce the metal concentration remaining on the silicon wafers after cleaning sequences.